changes in manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, and mining that transformed virtually every aspect of society

Ethnocentrism

Our Culture is right, yours is not. I'm civilized, you are not.

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Cultural Relativism

Understanding that cultures are different, but one is not better than the other.

Symbolic Interactionism

The way we build our social work is by interacting through these symbols

Reification

To reify; to make some kind of norm, behavior, or social agreement an unchangeable object.

Thomas Theorem

If one wants to understand why people do the things they do, one must take into account not only what is really going on in a particular situation but also what people think is going on.

Auguste Comte

Law of Three Stages:

1.Theological: Religious leaders are the major source of knowledge

2.Metaphysical: People turned to philosophers for guidance

3.Positive: Knowledge would be based on scientific principles

Emile Durkheim- Mechanical Solidarity

Mechanical Solidarity: People in the community functioning together as a simple machine.

Emile Durkheim - Collective Conscience

People Shared idea’s, values and goals

Emile Durkheim - Organic Solidarity

Organic Solidarity:Society functioned as a complex entity that depended on the proper functioning of a variety of parts,or organs:For example,because they worked in specialized occupations,people needed each other as sources of trade

Sociology

Is the scientific study of interactions and relations among human beings.

"Is the scientific study of Social Facts" - Durkheim

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Emile Durkheim- Social Facts

Social Facts:“Consist of manners of acting, thinking, and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him.

Sui generis

Latin phrase means: “Of its own kind”. Social facts can only be explained by other social facts and not by individual facts.

Ferdinand Tonnies - Gemeinschaft

Gemeinschaft: the nature of a relationship or friendship is communal (choosing a friend because you enjoy their company—hence think of the relationship as the end or benefit you seek)

Ferdinand Tonnies - Gesellschaft

A “means to an end” relationship (e.g., hiring a tutor to help you pass an exam).

Max Weber (way-ber):

Interested in the fact that human behavior was becoming more rational

Max Weber-Rational

Rational: Plotting to achieve a goal most efficiently. (Calculating)

Max Weber - Non-Rational

Non-rational: behavior that was not especially geared to achieving some goal but was simply to be experienced or appreciated for itself.(non-calculating).

Karl Marx

"Religion is the Opiate of the People"

Karl Marx- All but Economy is Epiphenomenal

Everything else is secondary to and in the service of the economic realities of society.

Karl Marx-Proletariat

Consisted of the workers --the people who survived by selling their labor to the bourgeoisie

Karl Marx- Bourgeosie

Bourgeoisie: People who owned the means of production—specifically, the owners of the factories that produced the goods sold and distributed throughout society.

Herbert Spencer

Survival of the Fittest:

Jane Addams

First sociologist to win a Nobel Prize, founded Hull House—served the needs of the poor in Chicago. Causes and consequences of poverty.

W.E.B. DuBois

Highly critical of the race system in the United States. Helped founded the NAACP

Individualism

Individualism: The Idea that in life people pursue their own ends, that people follow their own ideas.

C.E. Mills

C.E. Mills, “ Without the guidance of the sociological imagination, we are tempted to solve all problems by treating individuals.”

Social Imagination

Social Imagination:The ability to look beyond the personal troubles of individuals to see the public issues of social structure, that is that social forces operating in the larger society.

Emile Durkheim -Suicide

Found that the rate of suicide varies with the degree to which individuals are socially integrated, People with weaker or fewer ties within their social group are more likely to commit suicide, Protestants/Catholics

Robert K. Merton

”Understanding social things involves identifying their manifest functions which are intended and obvious, as well as their latent functions, which are unintended and frequently hidden”

Status

A position that a person occupies in a social structure (Family: mother, father, child, grandparent; Occupational: lawyer, president, firefighter; Social class: upper, lower, middle, other statuses would be race, age, sex, ethnicity

Achieved Status

positions in the social structure that individuals achieve for themselves (murderer, college graduate, doctor, etc.)

Ascribed Status

Ascribed Status: Individuals are placed, generally at birth, in a status, race, sex, ethnicity, age, and so on—that they cannot escape

Status Symbol

Clues to establish statuses, by watching or listening:The police officer’s uniform is a symbol of his occupational status; his wedding ring is a symbol of his marital status. The microphone a professor wears is a symbol to his status

Role

Role: obligations and expectations about the behavior attached to a particular social status in a particular situation

Role Strain

Role Strain: Experienced when one cannot keep up with all the demands of a particular role.

Status Inconsistency

When one occupies multiple statuses that, in combination, do not mesh with social expectations (50 year old Student/25 year old Professor)

Role Conflict

a clash in the demands of roles. (example a judges daughter is brought to court, the role of judge and parent would clash).

Master Status

Statuses are not weighed the same. A sociology professor is referred to as a female sociology professor—The female’s sex becomes her master status at this point because it is what is weighed heaviest.

Group Aggregate

Group aggregate: One or more other individuals with whom we share some sense of identity or common goals and with whom we interact within a specific social structure

(students in a class room).

Social Aggregate

some collectivity of people who happen to be in the same place at the same time. (fan’s at a ballgame).

Primary Group

Primary group: How humans are socialized—the group of how they are taught to be functioning members of social groups.

groups of people band together to achieve a specific goal and formalize their relationships with one another --generally operate under specific status positions, president, vice president, worker bee’s

Ideal Types

Ideal Types: pure form of bureaucracy, its what’s left when you strip away all the parts of an organization that are not necessary to it being a bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy: Area’s of authority are delegated to individuals

Iron Cage -Weber

iron cage, a technically ordered, rigid, dehumanized society. Our probable future would be even more bureaucratized, an iron cage that limits individual human potential rather than a technological utopia that sets us free

Goal Displacement

Goal displacement:When individuals lose sight of their ultimate purposes and the process becomes more important than the outcome.

Material Culture

Material Culture: Includes all those things that humans make or adapt from the raw stuff of nature: computers, houses, forks, bulldozers, jewelry, telephones, socks, etc.

Symbols:Anything that represents something else to more than one person

Language

Language: An organized set of symbols

Norms

Norms: Rules about behavior

Folkways

Folkways: represent casual norms; violations are not taken seriously.

Mores

Mores/Mos:These are anything but casual. Mores reflect important rules, such as the norms against unjustified assaults on other persons.

Taboos

Taboos: There are norms that are so deeply held that even the thought of violating them upsets people. For example, in the United States, there is a taboo against eating human flesh.

Formal Sanctions

Formal Sanction: Official responses from specific organizations within society, such as the government, universities, or churches.

Informal Sanctions

Informal Sanction: Come from individuals in a social group; can include being laughed at, given the cold shoulder, or to be made to feel humiliated.

Values

Values: general or abstract ideas about what is good and desirable, as opposed to what is bad and undesirable, in a society.

Beliefs

Beliefs: People’s ideas about what is real and what is not real; beliefs then, have to do with what people accept as factual.

Ideology

Ideology: Knowledge that has been distorted by social, economic, or political interests., Marx believed so the upper classes used ideology to maintain their economic superiority.

Social Institutions

Social institutions: An institution is a set of ideas about the way a specific important social need ought to be addressed. Institutional responses to problems tend to be justified by important social values and beliefs, and they tend to be slow to change. An institution, then, is part of nonmaterial culture.

Cultural Diffusion

Cultural diffusion: the process by which cultural things are adopted: (Americans got sushi bars from the Japanese’s culture, and the Japanese culture got baseball from the American culture.)

Cultural Leveling

Cultural leveling: AS cultural diffusion increases, the differences between cultures decrease. (E.g. when walking down the street in Moscow, London, New York, and you see someone eating a Big Mac while talking on their cell phone you would experience cultural leveling).

Subculture

Subculture: a group of people whose values, language, dress, and so on set them apart from the larger society.

Counter Culture

Counterculture:a subculture set apart from the larger culture, they are perceived to threaten the parent culture, (E.g., KKK, it proclaims a racism that most Americans find repugnant)

IdioCulture

Idioculture: “every group has to some extent a culture of its own.” -Gary AlanLittle League; each team developed its own norms (gum chewing, allowed or not) and customs (appropriate joking topics and nicknames)

Werner Heisenberg, uncertainty principle: There are important limits on science’s ability to measure and predict the behavior of physical objects

Micro Sociology

generally focus on the interactions of individuals and the context of those interactions. micro sociologist might as questions about the relationships between family members; who does the dishes, who takes care of childcare etc

Macro Sociology

focus on broader social phenomena, such as whole social structures, systems, and institutions. Macro-sociologist might look at the impact of economic change on divorce and birth rates in a particular society.